Is That An Echo I Hear?
Since 1995, EasyStreet has been coming up with good reasons why companies should outsource their IT infrastructures. Now, technology giants including Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Yahoo are echoing a lot of what we’ve been saying for 14 years. They too want to convince companies to move from costly and inefficient corporate data centers to the benefits of a cost-effective, shared environment.
The big difference, of course, is that the technology giants are talking about giant data centers shared by millions of users. Their lures are cloud computing and utility computing, which provides on-demand server capacity. But whether the message is coming from a giant company or from a considerably smaller EasyStreet, it’s clear that more and more companies are suffering from their own vastly overbuilt data centers, recurring upgrade costs and the dramatically escalating price of power.
TechRepublic.com’s editor-in-chief Jason Hines, writing on this topic, recently observed: “For governments, large financial institutions, and other high-security environments, outsourcing the data center will probably never make sense. For virtually everyone else, it’s going to become a very attractive option in the next 3-5 years. I suspect that a decade from now running your own data center will be the exception and not the rule, and IT departments will need a strong business case to justify the existence of a private data center.”
He notes that the Googles, Microsofts, et al, are arguing they can save companies from overprovisioning and overspending on server capacity while adding 24/7/365 monitoring, scalable load management and IT service management — same as you-know-who in Beaverton.
“Of course, the trade-off is that IT departments give up some control, and usually some staff positions as well,” Hines writes. “Many companies will be fine with that since IT is probably not one of their core competencies. They will welcome the expertise from a third party and will be happy to find a new way to control IT costs.”
Amen.
